Essays, history and the philosophy of science: how knowledge gets made, who made it, and what it costs us to look.
2 stories. Section line: Ionized calcium K, 393.4 nm.
Working for thirty cents an hour on glass plates of the southern sky, Henrietta Swan Leavitt found the relationship that let astronomers measure the universe. The paper announcing it went out under her director’s signature.
Light pollution is brightening the sky faster than satellite data suggested, and a growing fleet of satellites adds streaks of its own. What we lose when we cannot see the stars is not only astronomy.